Search engines are used for searching for information over the World Wide Web. A web search query refers to a query that a user enters into a web search engine in order to receive search results.
A query received from a user device may be explicit or implicit in different levels. An implicit query makes it complicated to provide appropriate search results to the user because the user intent is unclear. As an example, if the user's query is “Madonna clips” it is unclear whether the user is interested in listening to the entertainer Madonna music clips, viewing Madonna's video clips or downloading Madonna's clips to the user's device.
In general, web search engines generate large databases and indexes of websites and webpages accessible on the WWW, in a process known as web crawling. Such databases and indexes are updated frequently as websites and webpages are added, deleted, and changed very frequently on the WWW. The databases of a web search engine may include information regarding each webpage in the databases, such as the actual words on the webpage, and the index usually includes information relating to how a webpage should be classified and indexed in the databases. The indexing of webpages is based on the contents of a webpage, metadata and tags defined by the web-page designers.
When a user submits a search query to a web search engine, the web search engine uses its indexing system to determine which webpages in its databases match the search query with which it was provided. The web search engine may be able to rank the webpages in its databases which most closely match the search query with which it was provided. The webpages which most closely match the search query are returned to the user and usually presented in the form of a list, also known as search results, a search results list, or even an “answer” to a user's search query.
In conventional search engines, such as Google® and Bing, an input query is checked only against the indexes and databases maintained by the search engine. That is, a search query input to Google's search engine will be fully served by Google's databases and indexes and will not be relayed to other engines (e.g., to retrieve the result).
The indexing of web contents is limited in many aspects. For example, the indexing directly relates to contents of the webpages, as such webpages are not indexed to serve specific interests of users seeking for information. In addition, the search engines are limited to search only their index database, thus search results across difference resources cannot be retrieved.
With the widespread use of smartphones these days, users search for mobile applications (also referred to as ‘apps’) and contents provided through such apps. The conventional indexing solutions are not usually designed to index mobile applications or, more specifically, contents that can be retrieved through such applications.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a solution that would overcome the deficiencies of the conventional indexing solutions.